Download or read book Noun Classes and Categorization written by Colette Grinevald Craig and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is about the nature of categories in cognition and the relevance of these in language description, especially classifier systems. The classical view of categories was that they were discrete and based upon clusters of properties which were inherent to the entities. In recent years this conception has been challenged in different fields. By now prototype theory has established itself as one of the main approaches in linguistics. This volume brings classifier systems to the attention of cognitive psychologists dealing with the phenomenon of human categorization. For the general linguist it shows what can be learned from classifier systems into any theory on the nature of language organization, it will challenge some of the most entrenched notions in the field of linguistics, notions of what language is made of and how it functions.